‘Car guy’ revives 1953 Mercury convertible

John Higgins is a native Californian who, after 36 years as a manufacturer’s representative in Hawaii, sold his business and retired with his wife, Judi, to Redwood City in 2010. Yes, he knows he got it backwards!

I’ve always been a car guy. At the age of seven or eight, I tried to back my mother’s 1949 Ford convertible out of the garage.

I had observed that you push the gearshift lever up for reverse and you push the button on the lower left of the dash to start the engine. I did those two things in that order except that when I pushed up, I found second gear instead of reverse and promptly slammed into the wall of our home’s 1920s wooden garage in Pasadena.